Except for a few weeks over the summer, senior twins Haley and Colleen Anthonisen have been together since birth. They share their bedroom, their clothes, and a secret language.

“My friends say I mumble [because I talk to Haley so much],” Colleen said.

“It’s hard for [our older sister], Marion, because she wants to understand us,” Haley said.

Despite their close relationship, the two will attend different universities.

Colleen will be studying ballet at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., while Haley will attend the University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif.

Although the two know the transition will be difficult, they’re not sure what to expect.

To help them out, Francie and Kelly Neukom, ’04, and Beth and Amy Nelson, ’98, shared their experiences of being apart—and a little advice on surviving at college without your twin.

Unlike Haley and Colleen, who deliberately chose separate colleges, the Neukoms and Nelsons wanted to go to the colleges that best suited them whether they overlapped or not.

Although both Neukoms were accepted to Whitman College and Occidental College, in the end, Francie decided on Stanford University and Kelly on Occidental.

And even though Beth applied to two colleges Amy didn’t—Emory University and Occidental College—they both attended UC Berkeley.

During the Nelsons’ senior year, however, Amy attended college in New Zealand for 12 months, while Beth stayed at Berkeley. This was their first time apart except for a week of soccer camp.

Francie and Kelly had also spent “almost every moment together from the time [they were] negative nine months,” Kelly said in an article she wrote about being a twin for the Oxy Weekly.

Consequently, making the transition to living alone was difficult. Kelly said it was like losing a “third parent” that grew up with you.

Francie agreed. “The hardest part was not thinking of myself as a twin anymore. I would talk about ‘us.’ Two months [into] the school year, my friend asked me, ‘Francie, why do you always refer to yourself in the plural?’

“I realized that they must have been thinking I was talking about myself in the royal ‘we.’”

Kelly found it especially hard to be alone.

“I was used to telling [Francie] everything I was thinking, and it was strange to me to keep all of my thoughts to myself—I felt like my brain was really crowded with unsaid things,” she said.

Thus her first piece of advice for the Anthonisens is reassurance—“It’s okay to be lonely and want to have your twin back,” Kelly said.

While Haley and Colleen will miss each other, Haley said that she isn’t worried about making friends or being alone.

Both the Neukoms and Nelsons agreed that staying in touch is key whether it’s through e-mail, Facebook, or cell phones.

“Send the occasional random postcard. It doesn’t matter what it says,” the Nelsons suggest.

Amy noted that keeping in touch with a twin is easier than keeping in touch with a friend.

“You don’t need to be in constant contact to stay close. When I returned home, the year apart hadn’t made a difference—we were still as close as before,” she said.

Another important realization is that Haley and Colleen probably won’t find anyone to replace each other.

“I glommed on to my roommate during freshman year, and tried to use her as a substitute for Kelly without realizing,” Francie said.

Eventually she realized that she couldn’t expect anyone to fill that space in her life.

“Give yourself time to get used to being by yourself,” she said.

Beth and Amy jokingly added that having a full-size cutout of your twin was not a good idea, either.

Haley and Colleen should visit each other during the year, the Nelsons and Neukoms said.

Beth flew to New Zealand after Amy had been there for six months and spent about two weeks traveling with her during break.

“It was the longest we’d ever been separated, so I was overjoyed to see her. I’d talked about ‘my Bethy’ for weeks,” Amy said.

The Neukoms have also visited each other at least once a year in college.

Haley is already planning on accompanying Colleen to Indiana in August before she goes to school and then Colleen will visit Haley later on in the year.

A visit includes “the added bonus of instant celebrity,” Beth and Amy said.

“Even at Cal, which is pretty big and has a lot of characters, people still notice the twins,” Beth said.

“ [On our visits] I realized that people walking by us [would] stare. I was weirded out. Now I can’t believe I never noticed it before,” Kelly said.

Kelly said that she misses that “celebrity” feeling, but more importantly, she learned a lot from visiting her sister.

“Francie was a lot more confident and self-assured in college, and I realized how much it was benefiting her; therefore, [I] became more assured in my own life,” Kelly said.

Despite how hard it may be to separate, all four twins agree that it will be good for Haley and Colleen to live apart.

“I still struggle with thinking of myself as an individual. It amazes me that people want to be friends with me—just me—not me and Kelly,” Francie said.

And now that she has been an individual, she hates being thought of as “a package.”

“Alike as we are, we are two different people with different wants, needs and feelings,” Francie said.

Beth and Amy said it was important to know each other’s friends, but to remember “your twin’s new friends are not your new friends.

“It’s time to experience life as a single birth.”